An Extensible Markup Language for effective system and service federation

In defense applications, a Federation of Systems (FoS) is an autonomous environment where systems are managed without central authority and direction. In the case of Web applications, federated services means services from different providers are aggregated with the same business objectives as part of a value chain relationship. Managing such a dynamic environment requires an infrastructure-level coordination capability where policy and guidance of the joint objectives can be seamlessly exchanged and agreed on. Invented to support the US Department of Defense (DoD) Test & Evaluation (T&E) network mission operations, a set of computer-readable infrastructure descriptions, called Integration Markup Language (IML), was created by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to automate infrastructure management between federated partners. This paper describes the applications of IML as part of the Policy-Based Adaptive Network and Security Management (PAM)¹ project for the DoD T&E program and DoD/NASA Mission Command and Control. It provides a detailed illustration of how the language is used to assist partner systems to exchange policies without having to expose their internal applications and network infrastructures. An advantage of this feature eliminates the need to modify exiting systems, thus improving the efficiency of adoptability. This paper provides practical samples of the language schema and instruction of how to convert the enterprise network or application configuration into IML descriptions. This paper concludes by explaining how the IML can assist cross-provider collaboration of cloud-computing services as well as the applications of using IML to enhance cyber security.